RFR: 8190907: Windows 10 default Korean Font Malgun Gothic available not used by GUI elements even though available without Korean Language Pack

[Phil Race]

On Tue, 1 Mar 2022 08:31:47 GMT, Prasanta Sadhukhan <psadhukhan at openjdk.org> wrote:

> Malgun_Gothic(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malgun_Gothic) had replaced Gulim korean font so it needs to be updated to show korean fonts

There's no chaining mechanism in the way you describe it .. it would have to be in our fallback list.

Batang and Gulim are the fonts that have been available since .. well at least XP.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/batang

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/gulim

Malun Gothic only came in with Windows 7 :-
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/malgun-gothic

I think it reasonable to put malun.ttf in the "allfonts" as a fallback  if it really is pre-installed on ALL systems.

But actual Korean users really should be installing the Korean font pack regardless and then
we should pick the best available font. Maybe its the new ones now.

Replacing them would not have been possible in the past but now Vista isn't supported

Note that Gulim is a Sans Serif font, Batang a Serif font.
Malun Gothic is described as suitable for on screen display - it sounds like a replacement for Gulim
but not for Batang so it is correct you aren't replacing that.
But is there a new Serif font available too ?
Please investigate / check.

And it seems (ah I see Naoto spotted this too) there is a Bold version of
Malgun Gothic in its own ttf file : Malgunbd.ttf So we should start using that.
To your point about it not being in the pre-installed fonts it doesn't matter for the reason I gave.

One other thing you are going to have to check is the rendering of other scripts when running in a Korean locale.

Batang lists support for Arabic .. Malun does not .. but then neither does Gulim .. so it may be no worse.

But sequence.fallback doesn't have any obvious Arabic support.
We used to be able to count on Lucida Sans for that .. but may be there's another gap there.
Mainly make sure you don't increase that gap.

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PR: https://git.openjdk.java.net/jdk/pull/7643